The recently published A City and Its Fullness brings into English, for the first time, a cycle of stories by S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), the Nobel Prize-winning Hebrew author, based on the history of his Galician home town of Buczacz. Through these stories, Agnon, himself religiously observant for most of his literary career, takes his readers into the inner world of East European Jewish spiritual and communal life in a way unparalleled in Jewish literature. Reviewing the collection, Sarah Rindner examines Agnon’s appeal to the 21st-century Orthodox reader:
There are probably few readers outside of the Orthodox Jewish community who have the cultural literacy necessary to recognize many of the . . . allusions in Agnon’s stories. Yet Agnon’s works have not made the deep inroads into the Orthodox world that one might imagine they would.
This may in part be due to the fact that Agnon’s writing, like the work of other great modern authors, is complex and often ambiguous. He winks at the reader by using irony and the interplay of multiple perspectives. Even the name Agnon [deriving from the Hebrew word for sorrow] is a construct—a pen-name that refers to his first published story, “Agunot” [the term for wives abandoned by their husbands and prohibited by halakhic stricture from remarrying]. . . . Agnon is a master of self-invention and it is often difficult to pin him down to specific positions, theological or otherwise.
Yet his writing communicates an overarching message about Judaism and religious life in the modern world that transcends mere agnostic relativism. Indeed, the careful Orthodox reader of Agnon will relate to his elusive and slippery yet incredibly fruitful project of both depicting the complexities of the human condition and situating these human stories within the tapestry of . . . Jewish tradition. . . .
Were he more of a universalist, Agnon could have been a major modernist writer in the mode of James Joyce or William Faulkner. Instead he ultimately chose, through his extensive engagement with classical Jewish texts, and unwavering loyalty to his religion and nation, to remain within or at least alongside the tradition of his Jewish brethren. [Orthodox Jews] are the readers Agnon needs for his fiction to be understood and appreciated, and [they], in turn, will only be the richer for it.
Read more on Jewish Action: https://www.ou.org/jewish_action/09/2017/s-y-agnon-orthodox-reader/